Sir, - After a year's campaigning for people to "take advantage" of divorce, and two years after its general availability, the best figure that can be put on those seeking divorce is still under 9,000.
This is very substantially short of the 80,000 claimed to be in need of divorce ("trapped in loveless marriages") in 1995. No doubt the figure will increase. But where are the 80,000 who couldn't wait?
It is of course good news that so few have applied. Divorce closes the door on reconciliation and forces children into re-ordered families, with enormously damaging results, as report after report confirms.
Those who promoted divorce are now looking for hidden financial reasons for the low uptake. But the answer is, I would suggest, simpler. Most of those whose marriages have, sadly, broken down are those who entered into a commitment that they intended to be a lifelong one, and they remain reluctant to break that vow.
The real horror of what has been recklessly, ruthlessly and dishonestly pursued, in the name of freedom, is yet to come. As the culture of instability and co-habitation takes hold over the coming decades, marriages will decline, and divorces increase. Those who will have to pay will be the children, who will emerge as the social flotsam and jetsam of unstable unions, and the escape from responsibility. If anyone doubts this, just let them take a look at what is going on across the water.
But we don't yet have to go through with this. The culture, though started, has not as yet a firm grip. There is still time to pull back from the abyss, if we have but the will. - Yours, etc., Cllr Richard Greene,
The Palms, Roebuck Road, Dublin 14.